Whitfield Diffie

Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.

5 June 1944

Born on the same birth day (5 June): Abraham Viruthakulangara • André Lacroix (ice hockey) • Art Donovan • Benedetto Giustiniani • Bernard de Pourtalès • Dave Bolland • David Hare (playwright) • Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover • Jeff Garlin • John Maynard Keynes • Ken Follett • Moira Anderson • Paweł Kotla • Ralph Benatzky • Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick • Roger Tuivasa-Sheck • Suburban Legends • William Scamp

Born in the same month (June 1944): Ban Ki-moon • David Curry • Marvin Hamlisch • Patrick Sercu • Randy Johnson (quarterback) • Raymond Moody • Robert Powell • Tommie Smith